Hello, every body this is developer Tryggvi Hákonarson bringing you some rambling text about ship crew and AI.

Ceres just keeps growing. The latest is the addition of crew and AI to the ships. - Each ship now carries a small crew and a AI core. - Both the crew and the AI contribute to the performance of the ship with their experience. - Each ship now has a minimum crew number or skeleton crew and a max crew number. - The ships will operate at full capacity when the current crew number is above the skeleton number, but as soon as the crew number drops below that number, performance will start to suffer.

- Ship crew now has experience levels and gains experience through combat. There are currently 4 levels. Novice, Competent, Proficient and Expert. Novice give -10%Competent 0%Proficient 10%and Expert 20%. Crew status is uninjured, injured or dead. Injured crew counts as a half a crew man when calculating performance. Dead is dead. Crew is only injured when structure is taking damage and the Bridge of the vessel starts taking heavy hits.

Example 1: 1. If we have a frigate with a skeleton crew of 6, Uninjured crew 3 and injured crew 3. XP level is Novice Then performance would be a 64% 2. If however no one is injured then performance would be at 90% 3. With 1 Injured crew and XP level is Proficient would yield performance of 89% 4. With 3 dead crew and XP level is Proficient, would yield performance of 70%

This is just simple percentage math. It might grow more complex in the future, but currently this is the general idea.The AI works in similar way, but no crew. We haven‘t decided if it can be damaged, but that's probably a good bet. Example 2: Same frigate as above, now with a Expert AI.1. Performance 76% 2. Performance 108% 3. Performance 107% 4. Performance 84% So crew and AI can quite contribute to your ships performance. This is of course all in the works.

With the addition of Crew and AI, new modules need to be added and the ships need to be thought out a bit. Do we now need a Bridge module? Or a AI Core Module? Good to be able to switch them out for a more advanced types. The Bridge could provide bonuses for the protection of the crew, bonuses to performance and reduce the skeleton crew number. Advanced AI Core would strengthen the ship against hacking, also reduce the skeleton crew number, and provide bonuses to the ship.